ART REVIEWS

Shades of Death: Cam Slocum’s large, dark-stained photographic images have consistently brought us the grim, yet still remote, possibility of death. That remoteness seems distinctly less in the latest raw pigment on oak panels drawn together under the title “Man Kann Ja Nie Wissen,” or “You’ll Never Know.” Consisting of five large ink-soaked panels, each bears the image of a single coffin seen from the side and emerging dimly from the murk. One is closed but the other four are open and all set to go, with pillow fluffed and satin draped tastefully over the edge.

Standing in the center of the dim gallery and staring at the surrounding boxes is a lot like visiting a mortuary to shop for a casket. Each coffin becomes a solemn reminder of death. Strangely, that death becomes your own, even if the casket is for someone else.

The twist here comes from the ruminations on the meaning of life that spring up immediately when confronted with the absolute certainty of death. What is the hard drive for continuance against the inevitability of death? Slocum warns us in the title and in a series of quotes on formally engraved cards that “All that we know is, nothing can be known.” In the face of such nihilism all the viewer has left is a humbling sense of personal vulnerability.

In a lighter vein are John Baldessari’s prints from the “Hegel’s Cellar” series. Here, seeds in a melon, leaping horses and a naked leg in a hay loft dash off a kind of visual shorthand celebrating creativity, idealism and sexuality. Not that Baldessari casts art operating in a world without uncertainty or danger. Other images show doors opened by gangsters gaping into blackness, or fingers curling in rage near the soft waves of a woman’s hair. But these emotions are as carefully scripted, and emotionally removed, as an analyst’s notes. Baldessari is coolly conceptual with his visual deconstruction of images, keeping up an ongoing monologue on how meaning can be assessed and manipulated.

Slocum understands that manipulation too, but on another level he brings the message home.

Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., to July 7.